LOL: Yup. : Because Nothin’ says Christmas like:
“Turf War at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.”.
Creche children flee in horror.
Well, they should have, if they had a clue. I mean,
pretty obvious where that whole trip was headed from jump.
C’mon. Afterbirth in a barn?
I mean, where do Holiday hosts go from there?Yes, well now! Back to the house! Pudding, anyone?

“Princeton’s motto is:
In the nation’s service and service of all nations
JP Morgan-Chase, your actions violate our motto
Your predatory lending practices helped crash our economy
We’ve bailed out your executives’ bonuses
You’ve evicted struggling homeowners while taking their tax money
You support mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia
which destroys our ecological future
In light of these actions,
we protest the campus culture
that whitewashes the crooked dealings of Wall Street
as a prestigious career path.
We are here today
as a voice for the 99%
shut out by a system that punishes them
just for being born without privilege.
What we need is not a university for the 1%,
but a university “In the Nation’s Service,
and in the Service of All Nations.”

Of course, if political prognostication were athletics,
I’d be the beefy, lit-up streaker on the field.
Not much giving a damn, either. LOL.

Anyways ..So the last horse-meet , I said Edwards,
Yeh yeh, rub it in.
How was I supposed to know he was in Lamaze? I mean,
in retrospect, he could have survived the multiple felonies, right?
Well, prolly about halfway through ,till the “Inaugural Balls”, uhm – , the sex tapes, not the dance – .well, till they surfaced, anyways.

So, having no shame,
and mindful of what this can do to a candidate,
I venture forth once again.

Oh what the hell: Santorum in a stunning upset.
The Catholic thinking man’s choice: :lol: ( Anybody get a load of how the media is resuscitating THAT imbecile?)
::

I scribbled much about this guy David Rubin, in 2008, 2009….
bagman for Rendell and Richardson. They absolutely rigged 100’s of Billions in the Muni bond market.
This should be on the front page of every paper in the US, the way they looted everything in their wake….
Then again, why bloviate small?They should just be shot dead in the streets.
We know who these people are. We know what they do.This guy Rubin was Rendell’s transition chair.
All those gubernatorial patronage jobs, from Cabinet level on down, all those fixers put in to Administrative Law positions, regulatory commissions, professional “oversight” boards, municipal authorities and the like.

CDR Financial Products, the company at the centre of a five-year investigation into corruption in the US municipal bond market, and David Rubin, its founder, have pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges to rigging bids in the $3.7tn market.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Mr Rubin and colleagues Stewart Wolmark and Evan Zarefsky took kickbacks for organising bogus auctions among companies bidding for the right to invest proceeds raised by issuers through tax-free debt offerings. Mr Wolmark and Mr Zarefsky, who have previously pleaded not guilty, are due to stand trial next month.

Mr Rubin pleaded guilty Friday to felony counts of fraud, conspiracy and anticompetitive behaviour. He faces prison time and fines potentially totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars. CDR itself faces a maximum fine of more than $100m.

Mr Rubin had asked for a delay in the trial to tend to his wife, who is suffering from pancreatic cancer. When the judge in his case mentioned his wife’s health during Friday’s proceedings in Manhattan federal court, Mr Rubin broke down in tears, his attorney said.

“Mr Rubin has accepted responsibility for his actions, and he will now be able to devote all of his time and energies to caring for his wife and family during this critical time,” said Bradley Simon, the attorney.

The guilty pleas come more than five years after federal and state investigators began probing collusion and corruption in the $3.7tn debt market

used by states and municipalities to raise cash to fund projects ranging from roads and parks to hospitals and schools.

We know who they are. We know what they do.
Just nose deep in gangsterism.
So at this point, Why NOT give violence a chance?
They’ve stolen Trillions of dollars while people rot to death.
Seriously, just gun these motherfuckers down.
Of course, Feel free to improvise.

Pierce has one of those rare moments where he almost faces that Obama is part of the problem:

he end of 2011 is a time of breathless anxiety. The economy is still incredibly fragile. Lives are being broken on the wheel in a hundred different ways, not all of them unfamiliar. The lessons learned from the 2008 financial debacle are all the wrong ones. Three years later, we have some pale reforms in place, and the people who turned the international economy into a two-bit poker room in the Nevada desert are still acting as though they’ve had Jacob Marley’s chains draped on their shoulders. The political energy of the moment is powerful, but diffuse and unpredictable. This much is clear: The things that appeal to us to act as a unified political commonwealth for the benefit of our fellow citizens are as far out of fashion as they have been since the days of the robber barons and the cotton kings. What are we being asked to unite behind? Austerity. Sacrifice for thee, but not for them. A crippled middle class is being asked, quite seriously, to cripple itself further, and being told that this is all in the national interest. Our great national purpose is being defined, a little at a time, as giving up that which makes life merely economically tolerable for millions of our fellow Americans as a blood offering to The Goddamn Deficit, which has been transformed quite deliberately into an effective antidote to any kind of optimism. How dare all those families struggling to get by on Supplemental Security Income place all that debt on my grandchildren? Nothing has done more to reinforce the narrative of government’s being an illegitimate vehicle through which to pursue simple economic justice than the notion that trying to achieve it in the present is a criminal betrayal of a golden future that — cruelest of all jokes — is being made impossible by the policies being advocated today.

And this has not been strictly a partisan project, either, although watching the various Republicans traipsing around Iowa trying to demonstrate how absolutely tough they’ll be against the powerless is a rather vivid demonstration of the phenomenon. In their annual list of the nation’s most overlooked stories, the editors of The New Republic shrewdly dug up a column by Walter Shapiro in which Shapiro pointed out that President Obama’s fireside chat on the economy back on July 25 marked a turning point in our national conversation about what was done to our economy over the previous decade. The speech was a dead-assed appeal for a “balanced” approach to reducing the deficit:

Now, I realize that a lot of the new members of Congress and I don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues. But we were each elected by some of the same Americans for some of the same reasons. Yes, many want government to start living within its means. And many are fed up with a system in which the deck seems stacked against middle-class Americans in favor of the wealthiest few. But do you know what people are fed up with most of all? They’re fed up with a town where compromise has become a dirty word. They work all day long, many of them scraping by, just to put food on the table. And when these Americans come home at night, bone-tired, and turn on the news, all they see is the same partisan three-ring circus here in Washington. They see leaders who can’t seem to come together and do what it takes to make life just a little bit better for ordinary Americans. They’re offended by that. And they should be.

There is so much wrong with that. The tired “government should live within its means” trope, as though John Maynard Keynes had died as a child. The deflection of perfectly legitimate, class-based anger at the thieves and sharpers who stole the national wealth into a mushy criticism of generalized government dysfunction. What’s the takeaway here? That people can’t imagine government making their personal economies better, but are ready at all times to believe that it can make their personal economies worse? Ronald Reagan couldn’t have said it better. Walter Shapiro is right: This was a moment, and the president’s response to it was positively tone-deaf. Yes, I know, you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose. But there are all kinds of prose. A feed catalogue is prose, but so is Moby-Dick. Calvin Coolidge spoke in prose, but so did FDR. And, of course, we must never make the perfect the enemy of the good. But you know what else is the enemy of good? Timidity is the enemy of the good. Cruelty is the enemy of the good, and so are selfishness, bigotry, and ignorance. Why perfection is the only enemy of the good that ever seems worth fighting is a good question with which to launch the new year.

It is a dead-level time for us as a people. There are now 146 million Americans who are ranked as “low-income” or “poor.” Somebody really should do something about that. How we treat them in our politics is going to be the ultimate test of our moral credibility as a nation. Do we treat this situation as the national disgrace that it is, and commit ourselves as a nation to eliminating it? Or do we turn away from them, blame them for the malaise we feel in our lives, and drink deeply again from the supply-side, trickle-down snake oil? Do we look at the president — a Democratic president — and scream that this is no longer tolerable to us as a people? Or do we nod sagely and deplore the lack of civility and bipartisan cooperation in our government and hope that cooler heads will prevail, that the great national purpose of our age is to deprive ourselves further of what was supposed to be the promise of the country in the vague and futile hope that somehow, somewhere, things will get better down the line?

These people, like CP, just cannot face that it has failed. BOTH parties failed thru the decades and thru the centuries. One, at least, the DP in power now (to the extent it is allowed power as the second and handmaiden party) goes all the way back imo… and the R are an amalgam. Nothing new, whatever the date the GOP uses fr its birth.

I think we have shot our wad… and now the land the people of the US are nothing but a pawn for the transnationals. Pretzels will get worse and worse (worse than it wever was). A parade of Slobs and Mitts. They should disband congress and just have a panel of corporate representatives. Let us off the fake “Vote!” rigamarole.

Welp. The Anonymous is at it again.
Better call Fred and Ethel and the neighbors., etc..
Yep, they’re at it again.
This time they hacked STRATFOR,
knocked it right offline since Christmas Eve.
A goddam crime-scene and all.860,000 users, 50,000 from .mil and .gov domains.
Passwords, credit cards, the works.
Which is so wrong™.

And, it being the holidays and all, they re-appropriated a few million and dropped them into charities large and small.
Which, as is their wont, is prolly further hackilicious foreplay as the banks and the gub are working particularly hard with , shall we say, the larger, Imperial charities, trying to figure out the money flow. All Corzine-like and everthing. LOL. They apparently were poking around Liddy Dole’s old haunts at the Red Cross.
Which™ … is so wrong™.

And apparently they have more planned on the Mayhem front for the new year. Busy folks, them Anonymous.

WASHINGTON — Authorities say two doctors who traveled to Maryland to perform late-term abortions have been arrested and charged with multiple counts of murder, an unusual use of a law that allows for murder charges in the death of a viable fetus.

Dr. Steven Brigham of Voorhees, N.J., was taken into custody Wednesday night and is being held in the Camden County jail, according to police in Elkton, Md. Authorities also arrested Dr. Nicola Riley in Salt Lake City, and she is in jail in Utah.

The investigation began in August 2010 after what authorities say was a botched procedure at Brigham’s clinic in Elkton, Md. The 18-year-old woman was 21 weeks pregnant.

So.

At the age of 86, Noam Chomsky remains as active as ever in his work as a world-renowned political dissident and pioneering linguist. He has also opened a new chapter in his life, recently celebrating a one-year anniversary with his new wife, Valeria Wasserman Chomsky, his second marriage. Chomsky discusses the joys of newfound love and why it is a "pri […]

Noam Chomsky weighs in on the Black Lives Matter movement across the United States, calling it a response to the unresolved consequences of slavery and racism dating back hundreds of years. "[Slavery] is a large part of the basis for our wealth and privilege," Chomsky says. "Is there a slave museum in the United States? The first one is just b […]

Following its election in January on a pledge to confront the austerity program that's decimated Greece's economy, the Syriza government has faced a major pushback from international creditors led by Germany. Days after Greece secured a four-month extension to a loan package in exchange for new conditions on its spending, Noam Chomsky says the Euro […]

World-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky discusses why National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden should be welcomed back to the United States as a hero and why those who authorized the government surveillance he exposed should be on trial, not him. Chomsky also argues that while mass surveillance has been ineffective i […]

The Islamic State might be the best-funded radical Islamist group, perhaps in history, but the coalition air campaign that’s targeting its oil-refining operations and military assets has begun to damage…Click to Continue »

At the annual American-Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, speakers advanced Iran as an existential threat and sought to downplay differences between Israel and the US while demonstrators were arrested outside

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday the chamber was moving toward debate on a bill that would require President Barack Obama to submit any final nuclear deal with Iran for Congress' approval.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday against accepting a nuclear deal with Iran that would be a "countdown to a potential nuclear nightmare" by a country that "will always be an enemy of America".

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama's advisers would recommend he veto a Senate resolution to overturn recent National Labor Relations Board reforms if the measure were to reach the White House, his administration said in a statement.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bipartisan talks on a bill to streamline the passage of trade deals through Congress are "stuck" over Democratic demands, the Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance said on Tuesday.

Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.